Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

Editing the Lead Section

From the previous section, you know the importance of editing only a section rather than an entire article, whenever possible. But you may have noticed that in Figure 1-12 there was no [edit] link for the first sentence in the article, what Wikipedia calls the lead section. So, it appears that if you want to edit that section, you have to click the “edit this page” tab, just as if you wanted to edit the entire article.

In fact, it is possible to edit only the lead section of an article, though most editors don’t know how. There are actually three different options:

• The manual way is to click the [edit] link for a section below the lead section, then go to the URL at the top of the screen and change the number at the end of the URL to “0”. (The lead section of an article is always numbered section “0”.) Press Enter, and you’re then editing the lead section.

• The most complicated way is to add JavaScript code to your personal JavaScript page (Adding and Deleting Scripts), to give you either a special tab (the “0” tab) or an “edit” link. You can find these scripts in the “Navigating to Edit page” section of the page Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts (shortcut: WP:JS). (Note: To do so, you must be a registered editor; see Why Register?.)

• The easiest way is to click the “my preferences” link on the upper right of the page (which you won’t see unless you have a registered account and are logged in), go to the “Gadgets” tab. Select “Add an [edit] link for the lead section of a page”, and then click the “Save” button. Thereafter, whenever you’re editing an article, you’ll see something similar to Figure 1-13.

  

  Figure 1-13. After you’ve selected the option to add an edit link for the lead section on the Gadgets tab of the “My preferences” page, you see a new edit link to the right of the title of every article. Clicking that link will open the top section of the article for editing. (If you don’t see such a link, make sure you bypassed your browser’s cache as described at the bottom of the Gadgets tab.)